Illustration: Liu Rui 

China is full of doves. When challenged about the country’s direction, “China’s peaceful rise” leaps easily to official’s tongues, a term first coined in 2003. Officials and scholars alike like to emphasize that, unlike previous great powers, China has no intention of seizing more power through military adventures.

Let’s be fair. China hasn’t gone to war for 32 years, a much better record than any other country of its size. Its last war was a snit with Vietnam in 1979.

In that time, the US intervened militarily in Grenada, Libya, Lebanon, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Haiti. The USSR was bogged down in Afghanistan for 10 years, and its successor state fought with Georgia only last year. Even India went to war with Pakistan twice, as well as sending troops to Sri Lanka. China’s claims to peace look pretty solid in this context.

But for foreign visitors to China, the talk of peace doesn’t seem to go with the glorification of the military that pervades society. 

Take children’s education. Open a counting book, and what examples do you find? Alongside “One rabbit, two rabbits, three rabbits” is “One armored personnel carrier (APC), two APCs, three APCs” and “One attack helicopter, two attack helicopters, three attack helicopters.” 

Playing with a friend’s kid in a Beijing compound I noted that the colorful playground mural featured “missile boat,” “main battle tank” and “APC,” named both in English and Chinese, alongside common fare like trucks, cars, and boats. Is this really vital vocabulary for kids? True, boys everywhere love big guns and tanks, but parents normally do their best to discourage it. 

Children in the West play with toy guns, but they’re obviously designed to be fake. In China, they tote plastic AK-47s, detailed down to every last groove and socket. One can only imagine the fuss if a Western toy manufacturer lavished such detail on machines of war. Perhaps you could get away with it in Texas.

It’s not just for kids. The first thing that happens at university is two weeks of military training, complete with a chance to fire real bullets at the end. Every year, CCTV blasts military parades onto the screens for special occasions. For the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, Beijing’s streets were lined with tanks and new missiles were brought out for display. All over the country, posters display heroic army officers and laud the might of the military. 

The Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, is a somber affair designed to remind people of the horror of conflict, highlighting civilian accounts, the suffering of women and children, and soldier’s personal stories.

Beijing’s Military Museum, on the other hand, is full of displays of guns from around the world and heroic stories of the PLA. 

In her recent book, Unnatural Selection, US journalist Mara Hvistendahl highlights groups like “the Patriot Club, the Shanghai Band of Brothers, the Guangzhou Fight Men [and] Chongqing’s Green Beret. The aspiring warriors who make up their membership call the battles they wage ‘war games,’ a term that belies the seriousness they assign them.” True, such clubs exist in the West too. But there they’re restricted to paintball, in China, they use air guns, firing hard plastic pellets. It’s only a matter of time before somebody loses an eye, as my mum liked to say. 

It’s the young men who make up such clubs who are the most aggressively patriotic posters on the Chinese Internet, where they regularly call for hard-line policy. 

China’s love of the military has understandable roots. After decades of foreign exploitation and invasion, during which Chinese forces turned in a largely miserable performance, the well-disciplined and motivated PLA was one of the greatest sources of pride for the new country. Chinese “volunteers” fought heroically in the Korean War, and the army’s role as a shield against foreign invasion has been highlighted ever since. In the 1960s, many civilians in the countryside were drafted into “people’s militias,” ready to defend the motherland. 

But it’s been a long, long time since China was in any danger of foreign invasion. The USSR is no longer poised on the borders, and the US is far more eager for cash than conflict. With military budgets growing and nationalist rhetoric becoming increasingly common around spats over island resources with Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan, China is keen to play down any sense of threat to others. 

If that’s the case, maybe it’s time to tone down the military fetishism too?

The author is a historian and a copy editor with the Global Times. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn